Posted
by
timothy
on Monday March 15, 2004 @07:09PM
from the cockroach-of-the-sea dept.

SYFer writes "Trufresh, a Connecticut-based frozen food company claims that lobsters frozen with its special freezing process sometimes come back to life when thawed.
If these claims prove true, will the dubiously regarded field of "cryonics" finally get some respect?" If people were more like lobsters, maybe. The company's success rate at reviving lobsters after short-term freezing (at -40 degrees) is 12 out of 200.

Your link is slow as hell, so I did a google search for lobster.swf and turned up a huge number of really [jeffgill.net], really [cmdmusic.com] wierd [virtualdirk.com] links [seafish-education.org.uk]. I've done some bizzare searches [google.com] in my day, but this one probably takes the cake.

I used to go ice fishing as a kid.
We'd just throw the fish on the snow.
They'd freeze solid. At home we'd
toss them in water and they all came
back do life, only to die minutes later.
Clearly the article is about something
quite different, but I'm not stunned.

> I used to go ice fishing as a kid. We'd just throw the fish on the snow. They'd freeze solid. At home we'd toss them in water and they all came back do life, only to die minutes later. Clearly the article is about something quite different, but I'm not stunned.

A few years ago there was a news story about a kid who got lost in a blizzard. When they found her(?) she was "stiff as cordwood" and had a heart rate of 4 beats/minute. But they thawed her out OK.

Cold does have a unusual property of sometimes slowing down a person's normal metabolic and physiological functions to the point where it's hard to even detect it. There have been documented cases of people frozen stiff but having heartrates of less than 10/min. EMT's are trained to check the pulse of a person who's been frozen for a good minute to detect things like that, otherwise it's easy to assume that the guy is dead. Granted, it's not all that common, but it does happen enough that resusitation ef

It also presumes that the survival of any single lobster is due to some positive genetic component, and not just random chance or subtle variations in the freezing technique/time frozen. The article doesn't really have enough detail to tell whether or not their techniques are rigorously standardized.

I don't know enough about lobsters to know whether there is a plausible genetic component. I do know that certain types of deep sea fish have proteins that bind to ice particles in their blood, thereby allowing them to live happily in very, very cold water. The proteins are called antifreeze proteins. A quick search on PubMed turned up no mention of whether or not they exist in lobsters, but they do seem to exist in bacteria and plants as well as the arctic fish I was originally thinking of.

I worked in Alaska on a crab processing ship, & we used to do the same thing to crabs all the time. You'd toss them in the brine (salt water cooled well below freezing) for a few minutes & they'd come back to life pretty consistently. Crab's (& presumably lobsters as well) are pretty simple life forms, so they respond just fine to the freezing.

I was on a processing ship, so it was basically a factory that happened to be in the middle of the ocean. The dangerous job is crabbing, actually going out & catching the crabs. That is extremely dangerous, but it paid well. You were paid according the catch, and once you'd been on the ship a few seasons & earned a full share, it is possible to make $25,000 during a two-week King crab season. But you work 21 hours a day, seven days a week, moving around 1000 pound crab traps, often in sub-zero conditions, on a slippery, wildly rocking boat. Because of the speed at which you need to work, it's not possible for you to wear a life jacket, and if you go overboard, you'll be dead in about 4 minutes. Oh, and the crabs can easily take off a finger.

I briefly thought about trying to get a job on a crabber, but promptly realized that I wasn't cut out for that sort of work & stuck to the shitty processing job.

Well, as far as practical uses go (with the lobster) this could revolutionize the cooking industry!
Imagine being able to have live lobsters available at an instant's notice! No more having to worry about keeping the little buggers alive, just freeze 'em til you need your customer to pick out his lobster, then kill him and cook it!

The blurb reminds me of this [bash.org] classic. Only six percent of the lobsters survive being frozen.

On the other hand, I seem to recall watching a PBS "Nature" show which included a bit about a species frog (or toad?) that survived the frozen winter through some sort of hibernation, and I have to wonder if that's similar to what is going on with these lobsters.

I doubt public outcry will be so large. If there was a way to keep lobsters live before reaching the store by simply freezing them, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a bumper crop of cheap live lobster. The public doesn't have to see the reanimation process, so they would be nonethewiser.

As you said, we're cruel enough to the tasty critters already. What's one more freezing going to do?

Oh I wasn't saying no one would support it, just me. I don't have a problem being a carnivore, but various slaughter/harvest practices definitely hit the cruel level. If it isn't necessary to do the freeze/thaw/boil routine, and who hasn't seen live lobsters at their grocery store, then why?

>
>If it isn't necessary to do the freeze/thaw/boil routine, and who hasn't seen live lobsters at their grocery store, then why?
>

Of course, you are assuming that it is less cruel to live transport them than to freeze/thaw them. Transporting animals is also extremely
stressful and it could very possibly be more
humane to freeze/thaw them with them feeling
nothing in between than roughly transporting them all the way.

I understand that, but there's no REAL reason to belive that this will ever be possible...to fix damaged brain tissue without ever having access to the undamaged tissue...

To be honest, these people will probably end up being burried or cremated(sp?) like the rest of us in a few decades anyhow...there's no real reason the belive that these companies won't eventually enter bankruptcy like most every other company out there...

Yea. Ok, I guess that may be so, but then again...if that's gonna be the case, you'ld be better off paying the local Subway to do it...just let them stash your head in their freezer...it would accomplish the same thing...

It's possible, but far less likely. Real cryo storage is designed for extreme low temperature, long term, and no freeze/thaw cycling -- unlike Subway (I assume you mean the sandwich shop). All of these things *increase the chances* that recovery might be possible.

Increase the chances to what level? Nobody knows. Just up as high as we know how. If we knew a way to increase the chances even more (that wasn't prohibitively expensive), we'd do that, because nobody knows what the threshold for success will be.

The real problem I am afraid isn't tech. It is why. Why should we want to unfreeze these people in a hundred years?

Um, "we"? Why do you have any say in the matter? These people engaged in a contractual agreement with another party that promised to revive them. Why should that party not be required to hold up their end of the deal?

Agreed. Ted Williams' son just died recently [signonsandiego.com] and it's not clear whether he's also going to have his body at ALCOR. I believe there were a lot of issues like he never really paid the full bill for his dad's cryonics, and they possibly separated the head. I didn't know that Ted Wms' son had leukemia. Maybe he was banking on a cure for that or even using his dad's tissue to help with that.

Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.

I passed by his garden, and marked with one eye,
How the Owl and Panther we

I actually submitted the same story earlier 'Undead for dinner?', which isn't really worth mentioning, save for the fact that the following (basically) happened:

[typing in blurb]Lobsters frozen down to as cold as -40
f
[hrm wait was it C??][backspace]c
[Crap I better go find the article again]
[pinky on CTRL to begin "tab-surfing"]
[Groan and exclaim, outloud to self, 'I can be such a f*cking idiot sometimes][backspace]
reanimated when thawed.
[Giggles a bit thinking of what happens to the fool w

Don't get me wrong, I'd surely rather have my ego stroked, but it's not big enough to need soothing. Yet.

Now certain other editors, named after archangels, that reject my submissions, while selecting _crap_ stories, on a slow day- simultaneous to one of your comments magically modded down from + to -2 flamebait, should worry...;) j/k, I swear...

It was a joke. And even so, I said "-40 Kelvins", and never said anything about degrees. You assumed I was an idiot and inserted the word "degrees" in your head.

No need to assume or insert anything. The Kelvin is the SI unit of temperature. [nist.gov] It is perfectly correct to say that the temperature outside is 300 Kelvin, without throwing in the redundant word "degrees".

If you froze goldfish in liquid O2, we had a surprising amount of success reviving them. I believe the mitochondria were shattered due to ice crystals, so they only lasted for a bit. The tricky bit is keeping them alive. Did a fair amount of b-cell cloning - separate out the white blood cells, add enormous quantities of EBV, toss in nuked whites as feeders, and isolate the interesting ones. You could freeze down a single blood cell if you were careful (and used a bit of dimethyl sulfoxide to help with the crystallization problem)

I hear we missed out on the real fun however. Guess lighting charcoal was where the real action was. Picking up shattered goldfish bits got old fast....

"Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again."

Back in school we did an experiment on mud crabs with the similar results. We progressively cooled them down and measured their responses (forget how). Soon got bored and left them in the freezer. Remembered next day and found them (unsurprisingly) frozen completely solid in a block of ice. Thawed them out and the little buggers walked away. Our teacher nearly fell over in surprise!

Same thing happens with alpine Wetas (Native NZ crickets). In heavy frosts they freeze solid overnight and thaw out the next day. Research shows they have an antifreeze in their blood which helps to prevent ice xtals forming.

The main problem with human cryogenics is that the freezing process destroys the cell lining, but certain frogs have enough glucose in their cells to maintain the shape of the cell lining even when frozen. I'm not sure if this is the case with the lobsters.

At work we freeze mammalian cell lines for weeks at a time. A good percentage of the cells do survive process. I heard that a some of the researchers where taking this a step further to whole organisms. Though that hasn't been very successful.